Our View: Energy ever important to state of the union

President Barack Obama put a lot of emphasis on jobs and opportunity in his sixth State of the Union Address on Tuesday night.

President Barack Obama put a lot of emphasis on jobs and opportunity in his sixth State of the Union Address on Tuesday night.

He invoked post-Depression, post-World War II optimism and industry as motivations for Americans today.

Among several broad themes, including tax and immigration reform, and reducing the influence of money in politics, his focus on energy policy caught our attention, as SouthCoast looks over the horizon to a dawning revolution.

The president recalled his "all-of-the-above" energy strategy Tuesday night, which he first explained in detail several years ago. The plan recognizes the established infrastructure for fossil fuel energy generation and its importance to the economy at the same time as it encourages a path into renewable sources so that we might leave a cleaner, healthier planet to leave our descendants.

He recognized the powerful forces in Congress that arise any time there's a hint that climate change has anything to do with fossil fuels: "The differences in this chamber may be too deep right now to pass a comprehensive plan to fight climate change," he said, before calling for clean energy standards that help move innovation forward. It did not stop him from urging Congress to pass clean energy tax credits to help create jobs in these emerging fields.

As Cape Wind hopes to move forward with its plans to build more than 100 offshore wind turbines off our coast, we see the need for those credits. The cost to the taxpayer of the subsidy the credits provide must be seen in context of the whole balance sheet. On one side of the ledger, the shared burden of providing the tax credits yields the shared benefit of cleaner energy. On the other, the benefit of miniscule savings — infinitesimally small — to the individual taxpayer will be eaten up by the harm to all of the continued injection of carbon emissions into the atmosphere, and the rarely mentioned but potentially catastrophic continued absorption of carbon into the oceans.

Imagine the jobs around the country that could be created if those who insist climate change is a hoax saw things the way climate scientists do. A study of peer-reviewed articles on climate change between November 2012 and December 2013 (2,258 articles with 9,136 authors) shows one author — one — rejects man-made global warming.

Gratefully, the president, the governor and the majority of decision makers in Massachusetts have acted with the prudent conclusion that the change that we do need is in our policy.

Projects such as those that will come with Deepwater Wind's lease of the federal waters off of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, Dominion Virginia Power's lease off of Virginia and more leases to be auctioned off of our coast and in waters north and south will surely develop. Tax credits with criteria that satisfy members of Congress will stabilize the speculative nature of energy investment, and the state of our union will be strengthened.